An Architecture for Reactive Mobile Manipulation On-The-Move

Abstract

We present a reactive base control method that enables high performance mobile manipulation on-the-move in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Performing manipulation tasks while the mobile base remains in motion can significantly decrease the time required to perform multistep tasks, as well as improve the gracefulness of the robot's motion. Existing approaches to manipulation on-the-move either ignore the obstacle avoidance problem or rely on the execution of planned trajectories, which is not suitable in environments with dynamic objects and obstacles. The presented controller addresses both of these deficiencies and demonstrates robust performance of pick-and-place tasks in dynamic environments. The performance is evaluated on several simulated and real-world tasks. On a real-world task with static obstacles, we outperform an existing method by 48% in terms of total task time. Further, we present real-world examples of our robot performing manipulation tasks onthe-move while avoiding a second autonomous robot in the workspace. See benburgesslimerick.github.io/MotM-BaseControl for supplementary materials.

Visual Servoing Architecture of Mobile Manipulators for Precise Industrial Operations on Moving Objects

“…Arora and Papachristos [21] tackle the problem of the real-time tracking and grasping of a dynamic target by a mobile manipulation robot, inspired by the principles of visual servoing and the paradigm of virtual forcebased formulation. Finally, Burgess-Limerick et al [22] pose a generalized architecture for reactive mobile manipulation for grasping objects with unpredictable motion, tackling both scenarios of static and dynamic objects.…”

“…The above-mentioned papers address the tracking [19] and grasping of static [18,20] and dynamic objects [21,22] with mobile manipulators. Even so, further research is needed to meet the requirements of industrial applications involving the manipulation of moving objects.…”

“…At the same time, the manipulator is parametrized with I c to show compliant behavior to avoid any damage during contact. The state transition is managed by the end-effector error using Equation (12) (22). Regarding the PID values, the mobile platform is set to k b ▽ operation values while the manipulator is boosted with K a △ values to speed up this step.…”